EthHub Weekly #126
Medalla testnet live, Set v2 announced, Personal Token Agency announced, Hermez introduced and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
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👨🌾 Stay Up To Date on Yield Farming
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The Randomness Summit was announced by ETHGlobal this week which is a one day conference on August 13th for Randomness Beacon research and deployments - you can register for it here.
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
💸 PayPal to Reportedly Offer Crypto Trading Through Paxos Partnership
Digital payments giant PayPal reportedly plans to facilitate cryptocurrency trading through a new partnership with stablecoin operator Paxos. Industry news outlet Coindesk reported on Monday that PayPal plans to introduce crypto trading through Paxos’ new brokerage service.
The report follows the July 15 announcement of Paxos’ launch of a crypto brokerage that enables other firms to integrate crypto trading functionalities. The service can be used through a simple application programming interface integration and also manages regulatory compliance. According to Coindesk, PayPal will use this new service to deliver its crypto trading features.
⚖️ US Lawmakers Don’t Want Proof-of-Stake Networks to Get Overtaxed
Crypto holders earning new tokens by staking their coins might be at risk of being overtaxed, believe several members of Congress.
Four lawmakers wrote a letter to the Internal Revenue Service Wednesday, asking the U.S. tax agency to ensure stakers don’t face tax liabilities for receiving block rewards before they sell their new tokens.
“It is possible the taxation of ‘staking’ rewards as income may overstate taxpayers’ actual gains from participating in this new technology,” the letter said. “It could also result in a reporting and compliance nightmare, for taxpayers and the Service alike.”
The caucus clarified staking rewards should be taxed appropriately. “We believe that taxpayers’ true gains from these tokens should indeed be taxed,” the letter said.
Abraham Sutherland, a lecturer at the University of Virginia, told CoinDesk these concerns include the fact that staking protocols could create new blocks – and therefore, release new tokens – every few minutes, hours or days. Each of these blocks could be treated as an independent taxable event, meaning taxpayers could potentially have hundreds of taxable events every year, which would be a headache for both the taxpayer and the IRS to assess, he said.
Project Updates
What’s New in Eth2 - 8 August 2020
An overview of the recent Medalla testnet launch, the attacknets, BLS news and much more from Ben in his weekly eth2 update.
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #55 —Medalla Testnet
Recap of the Medalla testnet launch, the usual developer updates, an announcement of a new team member joining the PryLabs team, upcoming work and more.
Development Update #4 – ethereum.org
Fresh illustrations, new page designs, a new framework for the website, ethereum.org now available in 30 languages and more in this development update.
Eth2 Quick Update #14
A summary of the Medalla launch (bit dated now) and an update on the eth2 attacknet launch in this quick update from Danny Ryan.
yEarn yDAO Summoned
yDAO is a new DAO for the yEarn platform created by DAOhaus. It will be used to fund value-added contributions to the yEarn ecosystem, is open for anyone to request funding for yEarn related tasks, is focused solely on funding projects, not on protocol-level governance and more.
Introducing Set V2
Set V2 is a major upgrade coming to Set Protocol that will include new features such as multi-asset support, yield farming support, gas cost savings and more.
First Credit Delegation on Aave
Aave announced that DeversiFi, a decentralized exchange, was the first one to experiment with Credit Delegation by drawing a credit line from a Credit Delegation Vault.
yBorrow Launched
yBorrow allows LPs to create vaults and assign credit via Aave from which borrowers can draw their credit line. Credit delegation supports smart contract to smart contract. You can delegate to a yVault and farm yield with the borrowing asset you prefer.
DeFi Saver Launches Aave Dashboard
This new interface allows users to manage their Aave portfolio, boost & repay their positions in 1 transaction and full automation support is coming soon.
Introducing yDai
yDai is the first product built using the Yield Protocol. yDai will allow fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing and lending of Dai, and will reveal the Dai yield curve.
Introducing the Personal Token Agency
The Personal Token Agency is a project spun up by Cooper Turley that aims to be the first talent agency for personal token creators. The agency is being set up to establish best practices around personal tokens.
GridPlus Update: August 7th 2020
This past month the Grid+ team shipped Lattice1s to Ethereum developers and testers, external devs have had Prysmatic Labs’ eth2 validator client running on the device, the pace of GRID redemption by energy customers accelerated, ENS support has been integrated into their web wallet, and their CTO Alex Miller’s MetaMask fork including Lattice1 support has been tested and is functioning smoothly.
Hermez Introduced
Hermez is a new zk-rollup created by Iden3’s Labs. It uses SNARKs for validity proofs with on-chain data availability and can scale Ethereum to 2000 transactions per second.
dYdX Launches ETH-USD Perpetual Contract
The ETH-USD Perpetual Contract is live for trading on dYdX. Traders can get up to 10× leverage on their ETH without converting to any other token.
IDEX Raises $2.5mil Seed Round
The round was led by G1 Ventures and Borderless Capital, with participation from Collider Ventures and Ethereum prediction market project Gnosis.
Etherscan Homepage Updated
Everyone’s favorite block explorer got a face-lift this week and I personally think it looks great!
Reflexer Labs Raises $1.7M
The seed round was led by Paradigm, with participation from Standard Crypto, Compound founder Robert Leshner and Variant Fund, from a16z alum Jesse Walden.
Chicago DeFi Alliance Launches Accelerator Program
This new accelerator program will be devoted entirely to decentralized finance (DeFi) startups. The program will invest $120,000 in each participating team for future token purchases.
Power Pool Announced
Power Pool is an experimental protocol that is designed to help people accumulate governance tokens.
Dark Forest Announced
Dark Forest is an MMO space-conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe.
Strike Protocol Monthly Update
A healthy update for the month of July from the Strike Protocol team covering their revamped UI, some stats/metrics and more.
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Videos
Podcasts
The Graph: Making Ethereum Data More Accessible - Into the Ether
Exploring the Frontier | Erik Voorhees - Bankless
Andre Cronje on Yearn - The Defiant
Misc
Annotated eth2 specs from Vitalik and Ben Edgington
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Senior Accountant - Circle
Full-stack Developer - mStable
Frontend Engineer - Reality Cards
Senior Protocol Engineer - Foundation
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!
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